Ason Technology's booth at FPD International 2013. OLED lighting panels, etc are seen on the wall.

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An enlarged image of a panel

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A demonstration of the high color rendering performance of the panel at Choshu Industry Co Ltd's booth

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Ason Technology Co Ltd exhibited an OLED lighting panel made by stacking five light-emitting layers at FPD International 2013, which took place from Oct 23 to 25, 2013, in Yokohama, Japan.

This is the first time that the company has showed its OLED lighting panel at a trade show.

Ason Technology has been engaged in the development of OLED lighting panels using the "Ason Type" technology. The technology is based on the MPE (multi-photon emission) technology, which is for stacking light-emitting layers of OLED lighting panel.

In general, as the numbers of light-emitting layers of an OLED lighting panel increases, it becomes easier to realize a high brightness and color rendering performance with a small current, leading to a longer product life. On the other hand, it usually increases quenching caused by light interference.

Therefore, with the conventional MPE technology, the number of light-emitting layers can be up to two or three. But the Ason Type technology enables to stack 10 or more light-emitting layers, Ason Technology, said.

This time, Ason Technology exhibited a panel made by stacking five light-emitting layer. Though its luminous efficiency is as low as 15lm/W, it realizes a brightness of 5,000cd/m2 or higher with a color temperature slightly less than 4,000K. The brightness is higher than those of other companies' panels that have higher luminous efficiencies.

In addition to the multi-layered structure, Ason Technology made improvements to the diffusion reflection layer so that the emitted color does not change even when viewed from different angles, solving the typical problem for OLED lighting panels.

Though Ason Technology did not disclose details, it also made improvements to the manufacturing process of the panel to achieve a high use efficiency of materials and a high yield ratio.

"The initial yield ratios of other companies' OLED lighting panels were only 20%," said a company that developed manufacturing equipment for the panel. "But the yield ratio of Ason's panel was 100% from the start."

The luminous efficiency of the OLED lighting panel is low because Ason Technology used only fluorescent materials this time, Ason President Yukikazu Nakagawa said. The company will start to manufacture the panel by using a part of Renesas Electronics Corp's manufacturing plant in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, in February 2014 with a monthly production rate of 100 units. And it plans to use high-luminous efficiency phosphorescent materials in the production.

"Speaking of the production capacity, it is possible to produce 2,000 panels per month," Nakagawa said. "And we are planning to produce slightly less than 100,000 panels measuring 20 x 20cm per month by using the fifth-generation manufacturing equipment in 2016."